Quotulatiousness

March 17, 2014

On the election trail, the PQ would rather not talk secession right now

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:27

In Maclean’s, Paul Wells explains why Pauline Marois would prefer that the separatist part of the Parti Québécois platform just be background information:

The salvation of Quebec’s sovereignty movement has always been the reluctance of many voters and, indeed, of most political journalists to read and remember. Did you know that Jean-François Lisée, the Marois government’s minister for relations with anglophones, expects as many as 300,000 Quebecers to flee the province after a Yes vote in a referendum? Probably not. I’ve never seen anyone quote Lisée about the likelihood of a major post-referendum exodus. Yet he wrote it up in a book he published 14 years ago, and on the off chance anyone forgot to buy the book, he posted an excerpt on his blog, where it remains to this day. Lisée cites estimates between 150,000 and 300,000 departures after a Yes vote, before adding that even though it would mostly only be anglophones, it’d still hurt:

    There is no doubt this exodus would be all kinds of trouble for Quebec. The anglophone community contributes to Montreal’s and Quebec’s economic success, to its progress toward a knowledge economy … and powerfully contributes to connecting us with anglophone America, our main client and partner. The departure of 100,000 or 200,000 of them would stop Montreal’s economic recovery in its tracks and aggravate Quebec’s demographic decline …

Funny how he forgot to mention any of that during the 1995 secession referendum.

Lisée goes on to suggest means that might “reduce” this exsanguination from the Quebec economy, and I’ll leave it to readers to consider whether any of them constitutes more than wishful thinking. I’ll note only that he sees in promises of protection for Quebec’s anglophone minority “an important negotiating tool at the Quebec-Canada table” during post-referendum secession negotiations. I’m afraid this escapes me. “In return for allowing us to treat our anglophone minority well, you must … allow us to treat our anglophone minority well … or it will … uh … leave and become part of your workforce.” Then they’ll really have Ottawa over a barrel.

[…]

Anyway, I belabour all of this precisely to point out why Pauline Marois looks a little spooked these days whenever somebody asks her about her party’s raison d’être on the campaign trail. Negotiating, not with some vague angelic notion of reasonable Ontarians, but with Danielle Smith and Terry Glavin over the terms of deconfederation, in an attempt to stem a stampede of highly educated Quebecers that would, in Jean-François Lisée’s picturesque description, “stop Montreal’s economic recovery in its tracks,” is not super-high on most Quebecers’ to-do list for Q4 2014. How many Quebecers want to hear less campaign talk about sovereignty? Seven in 10, says today’s Léger poll [PDF]. One of my favourite rules of thumb holds that a party led by a veteran campaigner should have an advantage over a party with a rookie leader, but that’s predicated on the notion that experienced leaders are reassuring. A promise of nonstop secession headache eliminates Marois’s incumbent advantage. She could, of course, promise not to hold a referendum if elected. But that would tear her party apart. I almost feel sorry for her. Just kidding.

Current US government programs actually increase income inequality

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:32

In the Washington Post, George Will says that we’ve learned nothing about helping the poor since Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s day:

Between 2000, when 17 million received food stamps, and 2006, food stamp spending doubled, even though unemployment averaged just 5.1 percent. A few states have food stamp recruiters. An award was given to a state agency for a plan to cure “mountain pride” that afflicts “those who wished not to rely on others.”

Nearly two-thirds of households receiving food stamps qualify under “categorical eligibility” because they receive transportation assistance or certain other welfare services. We spend $1 trillion annually on federal welfare programs, decades after Daniel Patrick Moynihan said that if one-third of the money for poverty programs was given directly to the poor, there would be no poor. But there also would be no unionized poverty bureaucrats prospering and paying dues that fund the campaigns of Democratic politicians theatrically heartsick about inequality.

The welfare state, primarily devoted to pensions and medical care for the elderly, aggravates inequality. Young people just starting up the earnings ladder and families in the child-rearing, tuition-paying years subsidize the elderly, who have had lifetimes of accumulation. Households headed by people age 75 and older have the highest median net worth of any age group.

In this sixth year of near-zero interest rates, the government’s monetary policy breeds inequality. Low rates are intended to drive liquidity into the stock market in search of higher yields. The resulting boom in equity markets — up 30 percent last year alone — has primarily benefited the 10 percent who own 80 percent of all directly owned stocks.

Shane McGowan – amazingly still not dead

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:46

In City Journal, Matthew Hennessey reports the unbelievable news that Shane McGowan is still alive:

They say God takes care of fools and drunks. If so, he’s been working overtime the last few decades taking care of Shane MacGowan. As the frontman and principal songwriter of the Irish rock band the Pogues, MacGowan is as famous for his lyrics and whiskey-timbered voice as for his unlikely longevity, despite a Homeric appetite for intoxicating substances, especially, but not limited to, alcohol. Though he cuts a shambolic figure, MacGowan is still upright at 56, a feat many view as a minor miracle. His rheumy eyes and distinctive throat-clearing cackle suggest not genius, necessarily, but late-stage dipsomania; there is nary a tooth left in his head. God or something like God must be taking care of MacGowan. He’s not been doing the job himself.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, reports of MacGowan’s impending demise were so frequent that English author Tim Bradford felt compelled to write a book called Is Shane MacGowan Still Alive? No one, not even MacGowan, takes talk of his mortality seriously anymore. “For the last 35 years I’ve supposed to have been dead in six months,” he has said. “But when all these bastards say you’re going to be dead in six months it tends to give you an incentive not to be. . . . Let’s face it, I’ve got a charmed life. I’m a lucky bastard, know what I mean?”

Whether luck, God, or some combination of the two is responsible for MacGowan’s Promethean tolerance for self-abuse, he has nonetheless been deservedly celebrated for the vivid originality of his songwriting, for which he has often been called Ireland’s greatest living poet. Indeed, his best writing evokes the poetry of William Blake, whose claim that “the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom” has served as a road-map for MacGowan’s public career. “If you’re asking whether drink and drugs have worked for me,” he told an interviewer in 1994, “I’ve got to say they have. I’m one with William Blake on this one. Drink and drugs and all that shit, it’s a short cut to the subconscious.”

Fans and critics could be forgiven for thinking that MacGowan’s subconscious is a place of darkness, an insane asylum, a prison cell, or a congress of libertine Irish nationalists and saucy fair maidens groping their way toward alcoholic oblivion like Earth-bound fallen angels. But it is also a religious bouillabaisse of Celtic paganism, Catholic mysticism, and “drunken Zen.”

A perfect description: “Listening to the Pogues is like getting a punk-rock telegram from Brendan Behan.”

Tokenism watch – PhD models

Filed under: Business, Education, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:06

Martha Gill is underwhelmed by Betabrand’s use of PhDs as runway clothing models:

‘Hey ladies, you might have PhDs, but really you all want to be models’

Is there no job you don’t need a ludicrous set of qualifications for nowadays? Clothing company PhD, in a fairly ill-defined attempt to, I don’t know, raise awareness or something, have hit upon a novel concept for a fashion shoot: recruiting only models with PhDs.

“Our designers cooked up a collection of smart fashions for spring, so why not display them on the bodies of women with really big brains?” founder Chris Lindland said in a statement. Supporters have greeted it as a feminist move, saying it helps to promote “different kinds of female role models”.

Hmmm. Does it? I’m really not so sure that it does.

[…]

I mean, I see what they’re trying to do. They are trying to broaden the public’s idea of models, make them more representative, and show that being intelligent is something to aspire to, too. They just haven’t managed to do this. In any way.

You see, what I think they’ve done here is confuse the term “role model” with “clothing model”. The drive to make models more “representative” (see also Dove’s “real women” campaign) is actually setting up modelling to be far more aspirational than it is. It takes as read that being a model is the pinnacle of feminine achievement, and all we need to do to make girls feel good about themselves is to tell them they, too, can all be models. Even if they’re PhD students.

But models are just models. Really, really, ridiculously good-looking people doing what, when it comes down to it, is a fairly crap job.

The photo chosen to accompany the article in the Telegraph is why I originally wrote “runway model” instead of “clothing model”. The photos in the Daily Mail taken from the Betabrand website are much less … ridiculous than the Telegraph implies. They’re just modelling ordinary clothing for ordinary women, not the weird and totally impractical stuff some clothing designers foist on their runway models at fashion shows.

Betabrand PhD model example

I’d say there’s no story here (despite blogging about it), but there is. It’s just not quite the drive-by that the Telegraph‘s photo editor wants it to be. Betabrand scored a lot of free advertising and (probably) got its clothing line modelled on the cheap as well. It’s rather amusing that the Daily Mail is significantly more realistic in their coverage of this story than the Telegraph.

QotD: Psychology

Filed under: Health, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:05

It’s extremely important in this connection to remember that psychology is not a science, not even remotely. It is not the product of careful hypothesis-formation and controlled, repeatable, peer-reviewed experiment. It is nothing more than a collection of folklore and the armchair opinions of committees, less credible and valid than global warming. The authority it speaks from is purely political.

I know all of this because in college, I was a psychology major, myself, until I saw how empty the field is of anything resembling science or a decent, genuine regard for the well-being of other people. I read Dr. Thomas Szasz, beginning with his The Manufacture of Madness — in which he defines schizophrenia as a particular relationship between a therapist and his patient — and changed my major.

Five hundred years ago, if you were discovered to be in possession of a volume of the Book of Common Prayer that had a misplaced comma on Page 151, you might ultimately be burned at the stake for heresy. This had absolutely nothing to do with religion, it was simply an easy way for the political elite to justify disposing of its perceived enemies.

Psychology, as a body of “knowledge”, is more than just a little fallible. It will commonly declare some violent criminal “cured” and fit to interact peacefully and productively with society, following which the monster will immediately go out and axe-murder an entire family.

Psychology can be fooled into incarcerating individuals who are perfectly sane, as it once did with Nellie Bly, a courageous reporter investigating conditions in a New York mental asylum late in the 19th century. Nor have its powers of diagnosis much improved since then. On the other hand, if, like Ezra Pound or Frances Farmer (look them up), you hold opinions contrary to those the government wants you to hold — especially today on global warming, gun ownership, race relations, or the meaning and significance of the U.S. Constitution — it will more than question your sanity, it will lock you up and tear it to bits.

And today, when it does that, uniformed and armored thugs will show up at your home to shoot your dogs, stomp your kittens to death, terrify your family, empty out your gun safe, and murder you if you resist. Soon it may be enough to say that if you own guns you must be insane.

L. Neil Smith, “The New Inquisition”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2014-03-16

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